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H-Diplo | ISSF
Partnership
A production of H-Diplo with the journals Security Studies, International
Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, and the International Studies
Association's Security Studies Section (ISSS).
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/ISSFhttp://www.issforum.org
H-Diplo/ISSF Article Review Editors: James McAllister and Diane Labrosse
H-Diplo/ISSF Web and Production Editor: George Fujii
Commissioned for H-Diplo by James McAllister
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Authors' Response to H-Diplo | ISSF Article Review, 2013: 4
Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey Friedman, and Jacob Shapiro. "Testing the Surge:
Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?" International Security 37:1
(Summer 2012): 7-40. DOI: 10.1162/ISEC_a_00087.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00087
John Hagan, Joshua Kaiser, and Anna Hanson. "Correspondence: Assessing
the Synergy Thesis in Iraq" International Security 37:4 (Spring 2013):
173-198. DOI: 10.1162/ISEC_c_00118.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_c_00118
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Reviewed by Austin Long, Columbia University
Published by H-Diplo | ISSF on 10 April 2013 and on 22 May 2013
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-AR21.pdfhttp://www.h-net.org/~diplo/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-AR21-Response.pdf
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Authors' Response by: Stephen Biddle, George Washington University
Jeffrey A. Friedman, Harvard University
Jacob N. Shapiro, Princeton University
Competing accounts of why violence declined in Iraq in 2007 have shaped
U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, debates about force sizing and doctrines on
counterinsurgency, and academic research on the dynamics of armed
conflict. Nevertheless, few scholars have attempted to test these
competing accounts against one another systematically. "Testing the
Surge"1 approached this issue by combining declassified, geocoded data on
violent events with information about local-level military behavior gained
from an original series of seventy structured interviews with Coalition
officers. This evidence allowed us to leverage the substantial variation
in violence patterns across Iraq in order to evaluate causal claims. We
argued that the best explanation for why violence declined in Iraq in 2007
involves a synergistic interaction between the Surge and the Sunni
Awakening: both were necessary but neither was sufficient, while other
explanations (including the dynamics of sectarian cleansing) cannot
account for local or national violence trends.
In his review for H-Diplo/ISSF, Austin Long criticizes both of the
principal sources of evidence on which we base these findings.2 For our
dependent variable of violence trends, Long argues that the data we used
on "Significant Activities" (SIGACTs) offer limited insight into the
nature of Iraqi politics and have several potential biases. As for our
independent variables on local-level military behavior, Long is concerned
with the inferences we can draw from the interviews we conducted, arguing
in particular that we should have relied more heavily on Iraqi sources. We
respond to each of these critiques below, explaining why the drawbacks
Long identifies with the SIGACTs data do not undermine our analysis, and
why Long's objections to our interview evidence rest largely on a
misinterpretation of how we use that evidence.
First, let us consider the SIGACTs. The principal advantage of using these
data is that they record individual violent events, geocoded to specific
locations. There are roughly 200,000 SIGACTs on record between 2004 and
2008, allowing researchers to examine violence trends across almost any
possible subset of time and space. Analyzing this local-level variation is
critical to our analysis, because it allows us to assess how violence rose
and fell in the specific areas of operation for which the officers we
interviewed were responsible. More broadly, leveraging spatiotemporal
variation is critical for examining whether violence unfolded in the
manner predicted by different hypotheses about what drove the dynamics of
armed conflict in Iraq. The SIGACTs data provide the best resource we know
of for analyzing this variation.
Though we noted several potential drawbacks to these data,3 Long raises a
different issue, arguing that there is more to Iraqi political dynamics
than violence trends, and that data on violence alone thus cannot provide
a complete account of the war. He argues that "violence does not
necessarily tell us much about the local political dynamics that the
authors claim are important"(4); he points out that a decline in violence
could conceivably indicate that insurgents have gained uncontested
territorial control; he notes that if violence declines in one area this
could simply mean that insurgents have shifted their activities elsewhere;
and he claims that because SIGACTs data do not measure the damage caused
by violent events, they cannot say whether a drop in the number of attacks
has been counteracted by an increase in their severity.
This is surely true. It is also irrelevant to our article, which is
neither a general history of the war nor an exploration of Iraqi politics.
Our paper is a focused analysis of one aspect of the war: why the violence
came down in 2007. For this purpose, the SIGACTs violence data are not
only appropriate, they are essential: it is the trend in these data that
our analysis is intended to explain. These data do not say everything one
might want to know about Iraq, but the causes of the violence reduction
they present have been very controversial and constitute the research
question around which the whole paper is built.
We state this scope condition explicitly, not only in the paper's title
("Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?") but in
the introduction (7) and then again in the conclusion (36), where we
remind readers that our purpose is to explain why violence fell in 2007
but not to address various other questions, including the country's future
stability, or the degree to which the outcome met or failed to meet U.S.
war aims or, one might add, the country's internal politics per se. Our
analysis tests several claims about the role of Iraqi politics in the 2007
violence reduction, but our aim is to explain the violence, not the
politics - we analyze only the logical implications of others' claims
about Iraqi politics for observable violence trends. And it is precisely
these violence trends that the SIGACTs data present.
In fact, questions about which elements of Iraqi politics could plausibly
have driven violence trends - and which largely lagged them - drive many
ongoing debates about the war. This is especially true with respect to the
Sunni Awakening, which some authors have argued was mainly the reflection
of a beaten insurgency switching sides in order to mitigate the losses it
was sustaining at the hands of Coalition forces.4 Others, however, argued
that Sunni realignment happened before violence fell and was a necessary
cause of that decline5 - this second position is consistent with the
evidence we present in "Testing the Surge," and it is only because we
separate Iraq's violence from its politics that we can gain any traction
on the issue. Since violence trends are the feature of the war that we
study, the data we use for this purpose are entirely appropriate.
Long's related argument that low levels of SIGACTs could be bad news
rather than good (i.e., it could signify uncontested insurgent control) is
similarly true but irrelevant. We did not write a paper on the pros or
cons of reducing violence - we explain a much-discussed reduction, but we
are careful to delimit our claims to exclude judgments on this outcome's
ultimate value for U.S. (or Iraqi) interests. For what it is worth,
however, insurgents certainly did not emerge from the year in command of
Iraq's key terrain, and especially not in Baghdad or Anbar province, where
much of the reduction in violence occurred. In some cases it is certainly
possible that violence declined in one area as insurgents moved elsewhere,
but the extent of our geographic coverage (and the fact that violence
declined so broadly throughout the country) indicates that such shifts did
not drive the decline in violence overall. And Long's point that a
declining frequency in attacks may have simply been counteracted by an
increase in their intensity is also more of a hypothetical problem than an
actual one - we see no indication that this occurred systematically in a
way that would undermine our analysis, nor does Long offer any. If that
were generally occurring, the changes in Anbar from 2006-7 would not have
been accompanied by the precipitous reduction in Coalition casualties that
occurred.6
As for our interview evidence, Long's principal concern is that it is
"almost entirely derived from the perceptions of U.S. officers." Since
"only a tiny fraction of U.S. personnel in Iraq spoke Arabic," (5) and
because U.S. personnel rotated in and out of the theater so frequently, it
is unclear how much our interviewees really understood about the people
they were working with (and fighting against). Long views this as "deeply
problematic" for our argument. Reliance on U.S. interviewees could indeed
be a problem for some uses of interview data on Iraq - but not for ours.
Long's critique of our interviews rests largely on a misunderstanding of
the role they played in our analysis. We did not ask interviewees to
provide assessments of Iraqi politics, subjective perceptions of
motivation, or causal analyses of why Iraq's violence fell. Rather, we
asked for factual reporting on observable events occurring in that
officer's own area of operations (AO) and which the officers were in a
position to observe directly themselves. For assessing patterns of
sectarian cleansing, for example, this involved asking interviewees when
and where they observed Shiite militia attacks. For assessing the role of
U.S. forces, this entailed questions about how many troops were present
for duty, the manner in which they were deployed, and the boundaries of
their assigned battlespace. For assessing the Sunni Awakening, we asked
whether Sons of Iraq groups had been formed in the interviewee's AO, and
if so, when.7
By combining this evidence with other data, we could demonstrate that
sectarian violence did not decline once intermingled areas of Baghdad had
become homogenized; that where local Sunnis attempted to realign without
extensive protection from Coalition forces they were generally defeated or
contained by counterattacks from al Qaeda in Iraq; and that Surge forces
alone were generally unable to cause violence to decline at rapid or
sustainable rates until they partnered with the Sons of Iraq. Since these
claims are based on facts our interviewers directly observed (such as when
the local forces started cooperating with Coalition forces and not on
their ability to accurately infer what was going on between Iraqis), we do
not believe Long's critiques should reduce confidence in our claims.
Here, too, it is important to note the difference between a general
history of the war and a focused analysis of violence reduction. For the
former, Iraqi perspectives are important in their own right for
understanding the conflict holistically. For the latter, establishing key
facts on the ground is the requirement for inference, and direct
observation by credible sources is sufficient whether those sources are
Americans, Iraqis, or others.
Long raises some additional points that are worth mentioning briefly. For
example, Long criticizes the way that we portray the 2005 Sunni
realignment in al Qaim as being unable to spark the kind of broad, local
collaboration with Coalition forces that characterized the Awakening
movement later on. Long says that this is a "serious disconnect between
U.S. and Iraqi sources" because Iraqis "almost uniformly understood al
Qaim to be a success" (6). This is a critique Long has made elsewhere,
arguing that Sunni forces were largely capable of tackling al Qaeda with
limited Coalition support, and that the Surge was thus "a tragic waste of
resources."8 We have already responded to this argument in print, pointing
out that while one can label a realignment 'successful' or not depending
on one's criteria, the real issue here is whether anything about al Qaim
provides evidence to show that realignment without the surge could have
brought about the 2007 reduction in violence. In fact al Qaim provides no
such evidence:
"The outcome we seek to explain is a theaterwide reduction in violence;
our claim is that the Awakening's rapid spread across most of threatened
Iraq played a critical role in this, and that it would not have happened
without the Surge. None of the pre-surge realignment attempts spread
[including the 2005 attempt in al Qaim], and none even survived as an
organizational entity for more than six months. How does this demonstrate
that realignment without the Surge would have sufficed to stabilize
Iraq?"9
Later on, Long raises questions about how thoroughly we vetted our
interview evidence, writing that when interviews are conducted they "must
be used with care and checked against other sources" (7). On this point,
we are in full agreement - this is among the reasons why we conducted so
many interviews, and why we strove to support claims with evidence from
multiple interviewees and other corroborative sources. Long identifies no
examples of points where inadequate sourcing yielded error, and we are
certainly aware of none. In any event, we have made recordings of our
interviews publicly available, so others are free to assess our evidence
themselves.10
Long also spends a paragraph criticizing us for overemphasizing the role
of monetary incentives in explaining Sunni willingness to collaborate with
U.S. forces. Yet the passage he critiques presents others' views, not
ours. The passage he cites (6) from our article reads: "Proponents of the
Awakening thesis claim that violence declined in 2007 because the Sunni
insurgency abandoned its erstwhile AQI allies in exchange for U.S.
payments of $300 per fighter per month as "Sons of Iraq" (SOI) and a
promised ceasefire" (18, emphasis added). We identify these proponents
explicitly in the accompanying note, and they certainly do not include us;
we suspect few other readers of our paper would describe us as supporters
of the view that the Awakening alone caused Iraq's violence reduction.11
In closing, we wish to echo Long's call for more research on the dynamics
of violence in Iraq. For half a decade now, debates about Iraq's
turnaround - however durable it may or may not prove to be - have
essentially been stuck in first gear, with authors articulating various
explanations without systematically pitting their respective causal power
head-to-head. Some authors have even given up for lost the idea of sorting
through these claims, saying that since Iraq is just one case, it is
fundamentally impossible to draw causal inferences.12
At the very least, we hope to have made clear that this sort of analytic
pessimism is misplaced. The SIGACTs data identify variation in Iraq's
violence trends across almost any range of time and space that scholars
wish to examine. Gathering information on the independent variables that
might explain this variation is much harder, but we showed that it is
possible to make headway on this by conducting specially-designed,
structured interviews. By combining this evidence in "Testing the Surge,"
we demonstrated that U.S. policy played an important role in helping to
reduce violence in Iraq, but only with a level of assistance from local
forces that cannot necessarily be expected elsewhere. We did not claim
that this was the last word on why violence declined in Iraq in 2007.
Despite Long's reservations, we hope that scholars will see our evidence
and methodology as something on which to build.
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Notes
1 Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey A. Friedman, and Jacob N. Shapiro, "Testing the
Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?" International Security
37:1 (Summer 2012). Subsequent references cited parenthetically.
2 Austin Long, H-Diplo | ISSF article review 2013: 4,
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-AR21.pdf. In another recent
critique co-authored with Jon Lindsay, Long raised several additional
points to which we have responded separately. See "Correspondence:
Assessing the Synergy Thesis in Iraq," International Security 37:4 (Spring
2013).
3 See our discussion of these data on pp. 11-13 of our article, along with
broader discussions in Eli Berman, Jacob N. Shapiro, and Joseph Felter,
"Can Hearts and Minds Be Bought? The Economics of Counterinsurgency in
Iraq," Journal of Political Economy 119:4 (August 2011), and in the
documentation for the SIGACTs data which are available at
www.esoc.princeton.edu.
4 See the references cited in note 2 of the paper.
5 See the references cited in notes 3 and 5 of the paper.
6 For casualties data see iCasualties.org.
7 The questionnaire we used to structure our interviews has been made
available along with recordings of those interviews, and it is also
included with our online supplementary materials.
8 See "Correspondence,"181.
9 Ibid., 191-192.
10 Audio files of our interviews have been deposited at the U.S. Army
Military History Institute archive in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
11 We cite no interviews of our own on this point, and are at a loss to
understand why Long believes this sheds doubt on the general utility of
our interview evidence base.
12 See note 21 of our paper.
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